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<title>Bill Wattenburg’s Background: Blood Banks</title>
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<h1>Blood Banks</h1>

<p>Bill Wattenburg’s first reported entry in the public domain happened when he was a young
assistant professor at Berkeley. The Director of the Alameda County Blood Bank, Dr. David
Singman, a pathologist at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, came to him in 1965 with a problem at
the Alameda–Contra Costa Blood Bank that was costing a great deal of money and loss of life
around the country. In the traditional way that blood banks distributed blood to local hospitals,
up to twenty percent of the blood was being lost because of “outdating”. This spoilage
occurred because the blood sat in refrigerators in the hospitals past the thirty-day limit during which it
could be safely used somewhere else. Once a unit of blood was sent to a hospital, it was usually
cross-matched and set aside for a particular patient. Even if the patient didn’t need it later, this
particular unit of blood was seldom ever sent to another hospital before it became outdated and
had to be thrown away.</p>

<p>Dr. Singman knew that Wattenburg was designing computers at U.C Berkeley at the time.
He told Wattenburg about this problem and asked him if he could solve it.</p>

<p>On his own time, Wattenburg first designed a method to positively identify each pint of
blood by a special code before it left the blood bank. He then designed a computer system to
track each pint of blood as it went into hospital inventories. Frustrated with writing proposals and
waiting for government money to buy the computer equipment he needed, Wattenburg convinced
Lockheed Missiles &amp; Space Co. in Sunnyvale to contribute time on one of their large defense
computers during nighttime. Wattenburg had earlier helped design this computer for an Air Force
project. He made a deal with Lockheed—He promised to show them how to save at least an hour
of computer time a day on the Air Force project in return for the fifteen minutes at night he
needed for the blood bank.</p>

<p>Next, he devised a scheme to hook up all hospitals and the Alameda Blood Bank to the
Lockheed Sunnyvale central computer over telephone lines. This was ten years before remote
data terminals for computers were commonly available.</p>

<p>Finally, he designed the computer programs that allowed the Alameda blood bank to keep
track of every pint of blood in its inventory and sitting at the hospitals it served, His system
allowed the blood bank to order all blood units approaching outdating at the hospitals to be
located everyday and sent to other hospitals where they were needed instead of sending new units
from the blood bank while the old units went to waste in hospital refrigerators.</p>

<p><b>His clever solution stopped the needless waste of ten percent of the blood supply in the Bay
Area in the first year it was used. The average age of transfused blood was reduced by ten percent,
and the need for outside donors was reduced by thirty-three percent. His system was quickly
adopted by the Red Cross nationwide. The results were published in The Journal of the American
Medical Association (JAMA), November 8, 1965, pp 583–586, “Computerized Blood Bank
Control”. Wattenburg’s design was soon adopted by most blood banks throughout the country.</b></p>

<p>Dr. Singman has died, but we talked to a retired Red Cross medical advisor who knew Dr.
Singman at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley when he was working with Wattenburg on this
project. He remembers when all this happened twenty-five years ago. He says that some top
Red Cross administrators were defensive and annoyed over the attention that Wattenburg’s
innovation received in the press. “They were forced to admit that it was a great improvement and
that they would use it as soon as possible, but they were uncomfortable because his idea and the
JAMA article also brought public attention to the fact that large amounts of blood had been lost in
the past because they had not recognized something that seemed so simple.” He said he
remembers how he kicked himself when he saw it. He says that, for certain, hundreds of lives
have been saved in the twenty-five years since then because desperately needed blood has been
available were and when it is needed, and the cost of blood has been reduced significantly. He
remembers that Wattenburg was invited to a blood bank association meeting in San Francisco
shortly after the JAMA article appeared. Wattenburg announced that he was giving the rights to
his idea to any blood bank that wanted to use it, free of charge. However, Lockheed built a
substantial business supplying the computer programs and equipment to hundreds of blood banks
around the country.</p>

<p>In one of our interviews with him, we showed Wattenburg the nice comments above and
said that he must be very proud of what he had done at such an early age (29). He displayed
some annoyance. He then told us that a U.C. Berkeley faculty promotions committee in 1966
concluded that this work for the nation’s blood banks was “more in the line of public service than
university level scientific research worthy of promotion consideration.” He said that this
disappointment was the second time that, “This sort of thing happened to me, but I grew up after
that.” He wouldn’t elaborate on what the first time was.</p>

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